Corporate law scholar to join Duke faculty

May 27, 2009Duke Law News

Kimberly D. Krawiec, a professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will join the Duke Law School faculty effective July 1.

A widely published scholar of corporate law, Krawiec teaches courses on securities, corporate, and derivatives law. Her research interests span a variety of fields, including the empirical analysis of contract disputes; the choice of organizational form by professional service firms, including law firms; banned commercial exchanges; corporate compliance systems; insider trading; derivatives hedging practices; and “rogue” trading.

A visiting professor at Duke Law during the 2008-09 academic year, Krawiec also has taught law at the University of Virginia, Harvard, and Northwestern, where she received the 1999-2000 Robert Childres Award for Teaching Excellence.

“Professor Krawiec is an engaging scholar and teacher whose work on derivatives, hedging, financial rogues, intermediaries, and unconventional markets is of the greatest interest, particularly in the current economic turmoil,” said Dean David F. Levi. “She is a most welcome addition to our faculty.”

Prior to joining academia, Krawiec was a member of the Commodity & Derivatives Group at the New York office of Sullivan & Cromwell. She has served as a commentator for the Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative (CEELI) of the American Bar Association and on the faculty of the National Association of Securities Dealers Institute for Professional Development at the Wharton School of Business. She holds a juris doctorate from Georgetown University and a bachelor’s degree from North Carolina State University.

Krawiec has published on a wide range of topics. In 2000, she wrote an article in the Oregon Law Review arguing that banks benefited from and rewarded “rogue” trading -- the practice of making unauthorized and risky trades on behalf of an employer or financial institution -- because risk nets profit. She revisits the idea in a 2009 article published in the Arizona Law Review, which notes that the idea of bank complicity in rogue trading seemed strange in 2000, but is commonly accepted today.

Krawiec’s more recent works address trade within forbidden or contested markets and organizational misconduct. Her recent works include “Price and Pretense in The Baby Market,” in Baby Markets: Money, Morals, And The Neopolitics Of Choice (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2009); “Sunny Samaritans & Egomaniacs: Price-Fixing in the Gamete Market,” and “Show Me The Money: Making Markets in Forbidden Exchange,” forthcoming in Duke Law School’s Law and Contemporary Problems; and “Altruism and Intermediation in the Market for Babies,” in the Washington & Lee Law Review. She also recently contributed a chapter, “Operational Risk Management: An Emergent Industry,” to the book Operational Risk Towards Basel III: Best Practices And Issues In Modeling, Management And Regulation (John Wiley and Sons, 2009).

Krawiec joins a strong corporate law faculty that includes Professors Deborah DeMott, Stephen Schwarcz, Mitu Gulati , and James Cox, as well as Professors of the Practice Bill Brown and Lawrence Baxter, both of whom joined the faculty this year and bring deep experience from the banking and financial services industries.

Krawiec is the third lateral hire for Duke Law during this academic term; Laurence Helfer, of Vanderbilt University, and Guy-Uriel Charles, of the University of Minnesota, also will join Duke Law in July. In addition, Joseph Blocher, a 2006 graduate of Yale Law School and law clerk to Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, will join the Duke Law faculty in July as an assistant professor of law.

“We have a lot to celebrate,” said Professor Deborah DeMott, who chaired the Law School’s committee on lateral faculty appointments. “Each of our new colleagues will make a distinctive contribution to our scholarship as a faculty and to what we offer our students.”